


A Familiar Mask

by Jake_the_space_cat



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Amaurotine Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Ascians (Final Fantasy XIV), Battle of Carteneau (Final Fantasy XIV), Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Gen, I do love me the lore, I wasn't there for 1.0 so I'm winging the lore a bit, Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Other, Patch 5.0: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Pre-Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Pre-Sundering (Final Fantasy XIV), Prophetic Visions, The Echo (Final Fantasy XIV), Tumblr Prompt, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:08:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24015694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jake_the_space_cat/pseuds/Jake_the_space_cat
Summary: Is it seeing the future or remembering the past? One Warrior of Light's first, and quickly forgotten, encounter with the Echo--and Amaurot--on the eve of the Calamity.
Relationships: 14th Member of the Convocation of Fourteen/Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch
Kudos: 2





	A Familiar Mask

**Author's Note:**

> For #seaswolchallenge on Tumblr. My WoL, Hyur Highlander Camille Delane, came out of the Calamity with facial tattoos from a Garlean experimental prisoner-of-war marking device used on him while he was unconscious following the rest of his squad being wiped out on the fringes of Carteneau and the Calamity. (Cam also goes into Carteneau with his voice and leaves it mute, his vocal cords damaged by the same device that left the tattoos. Less important to the story but also good to know!)
> 
> Warning for nebulous spoilers for Shadowbringers.
> 
> Prompt is “Omen.”

“You alright there, Cam?”

The little Midlander crouched in the scrub to Cam’s left cocked his head, one eyebrow raised. Georg was small even for a Midlander, and the two Lalas in the squad were always giving him hell for it. At six foot four, Cam could have given him hell, too, but didn’t have the heart for it. Who knew how long they might all live? Better to watch and listen, to know the men and women he fought with and to maybe remember afterwards, than to joke and make everything—flat, somehow. Too easy.

“Hm?” Cam pulled his eyes away from Dalamud, burning red and low in the sky, and shrugged with one shoulder. “I’ll be fine. It’s just–” He glanced up at the descending moon again and shrugged a second time.

“I don’t like looking at it. I don’t know how you do it.” Georg shifted in the scrub, nervous energy clear in the tense of his hands on his bow, held loose but ready. “I can’t stop it coming down, so why look at it? I just want to—something to fight. Something to do. You know?”

“Yeah.” Cam smiled slightly. That was everyone in their small group of archers—all Limsa Lominsans who’d gotten tired of watching death descend and wanted to—rise to meet it, he supposed. To do anything at all.

“What do you see when you look at it?”

“I used to see–” –my cousins, Cam had intended to finish. Brendan and Neil—the first two of his family to sign up to fight the Garleans and the first two to die. But as he looked up at Dalamud again, a flash of sharp pain cracked through his head. Images and emotions flashed behind and around the pain.

_A blazing emblem before the face of the moon, hot-white and burning and edged as a mask of still-molten glass. Behind it, more stars falling, more moons, more than could possibly have filled one sky. A feeling of loss, but a loss understood and accepted, not the terrible fear of the coming impossible death that had haunted all of Eorzea since the moon began to fall. A loss terrible but inevitable. A loss that brought room for new growth._

_Dragons. Filling the sky, shapes and sizes too many to count. Or primals or nightmare creatures too terrible to focus on properly. A sense of all the gods ever envisioned descending on the earth. Every creature of the imagination loose to inflict wonder or terror._

_A tall man, a slight giant, shoulders bowed, stepping further down into darkness through green light, face unseen but silhouette known. Light above rippling like sun through deep water. Moving away from the darkness and the figure in its lost underworld, rushing towards the light, breaking through into air, shattering. A thousand pieces of the self breaking as though with the surf._

_A face familiar but unknown. A Midlander fighting beside others—friends, comrades. A sky behind them consumed by light even as they smile and laugh and survive another battle together, unknowing and sure in their fellowship._

_The white lines of the emblem again, a mask of curves and points above unseen brows, along the planes of a cheeks and jawbone. The shock of the mask pressing down into his own face, his own skin. Trying to scream but hearing only silence. The flash of other faces, other lives glimpsed, too fast and sharp and many to comprehend._

“Cam!” Georg’s face close, the Midlander’s hands on Cam’s shoulders.

Cam blinked and flinched, hands spasming briefly. For a moment it didn’t occur to him to speak. For a moment, he could have sworn that he couldn’t speak, and there was a brief disorienting shock as he fell back into himself and realized how little sense that made.

“What–” He flinched again, tension and disorientation but no longer pain. “Did you see that?”

“I didn’t see anything, Cam. Did you—that wasn't—you looked like–” Georg drew back slowly. “You looked like you were being tempered.”

Cam didn’t have time to answer. Below them, further down the rise, the signal came back from their squad leader—time to move forward, _now_.

Georg rushed off, looking back to Cam for a moment, expression still troubled. As Cam followed after, he had only a moment to wonder. Had Georg * **seen*** people tempered? What important things did Cam not know—might never know—about the other archers running beside him? About their lives and their families and their hurts?

As they ran forward to their place in what would later be known as the Calamity, memory of the vision slipped from Cam’s mind. Too much else would happen that day to remember a few moments of pain and fractured images. Too much would change, and too much be lost.

By the time he woke up in a field hospital days later, by the time he looked into a mirror and first saw the prisoner of war marks the Garleans had left on his skin, he had no idea why the pattern felt strangely familiar, as though he had worn it before.


End file.
